ChatGPT ‘is literally going to change everything,’ Valley tech experts talk influx of AI
Artificial intelligence is making a big impact on the tech industry.
ChatGPT, which stands for generative pre-trained transformers, is a chatbot introduced to the world in November 2022 by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company. The tool is primed to revolutionize how businesses — including those in the Valley — create content and engage with consumers. But its emergence hasn’t come without pushback.
The multifunctional software can serve as a search engine, write a bio or even an article, and so much more, all generated through typed commands with conversational responses. Developers can use the open api to activate voice for input and output.
“Just for the fun of it, I asked ChatGPT to write me a 200-word article about the growth of the technology industry in Arizona, and do it in my voice,” said Steve Zylstra, president and CEO of the Arizona Technology Council and SciTech Institute. “So what ChatGPT does, it goes out and finds everything I’ve written that’s in the public domain, and the article comes back in my style, and you know, that’s pretty darn powerful.”
Just a few years ago, this type of technology was thought to exist in the distant future, but with other AI-empowered advances such as self-driving cars and flying drones, it’s clear that the tech world is ready for its arrival. Already businesses are finding impactful ways to use similar tools in industries across the board including health care, finance and education, from scheduling appointments and managing finances to personalized learning experiences.
“I thought about it and what its impact might be,” Zylstra said. “But it wasn’t until I actually used it that it hit me how important it was going to be and how transformational it’s going to be.”
He compared it to the way in which the internet and the smartphone transformed the way people live, with everywhere we look, people on their devices using social media, searching the web, shopping for new finds or communicating with friends.
It’s game-changing technology
Vincent Serpico, the CEO of Phoenix-based software development company Founders Workshop, who’s been coding since he was 14-years-old, shared a similar reaction.
“I have been playing around with OpenAi, doing a lot of coding the last few months. I have never seen anything of this magnitude in my entire life, Serpico said. He cites a quote from the article “The Age of AI has begun” featured last month on Bill Gates’ LinkedIn blog Gates Notes.
Gates expresses awe in the advancement in technology, “In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary.” He goes on to explain in the article that those times were in 1980 when he saw his first graphical interface and in 2022 when he witnessed the capabilities of ChatGPT.
Serpico, who has used ChatGPT to generate code, create user journey maps and write stories, sees it as a game-changing technology because of how it leverages content from the internet and makes sense of it in a way that people can interact with it and extract meaning from it.
OpenAI also introduced plugins to connect with third-party services. Plugins are similar to mobile apps for an iPhone, Serpico explained. With plugins, users are able to do very specific things. Serpico described a demo where ChatGPT was asked for recipe ideas.
ChatGPT used a plug-in to search for several recipes. Then it was asked about the calories in each recipe, and a different plug-in was used to get the exact calorie count from Wolfram. A command was given to order all the ingredients necessary for the recipes. A plug-in from Instacart was used for the shopping and delivery.
There could be drawbacks
But some say it is best to proceed with caution regarding ChatGPT’s fast-track.
A March 22 open letter warning that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,” has received more than 10,000 signatures from AI experts, researchers and supporters including OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy Marc Rotenberg and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who called for all AI labs to place an immediate six-month pause on the development of iterations more powerful than GPT-4.
Although Zylstra is not sure of the motivation behind the call for a brief halt, he does see drawbacks to the technology, driven more by the user than the software.
“All of us should have fear in what bad people use these kinds of tools for,” he said. “There are bad actors out there that will always turn something that’s positive, for most of us, into bad behavior.”
The idea of those with dubious intent using the software for misleading purposes has crossed Serpico’s mind as well, suggesting that content could be created to shape a dangerous narrative that is completely false, giving the example of a video showing the president of the United States saying something that he did not actually say. He also explained how more sophisticated users could employ the tool for hacking.
Serpico also weighs in on the impact that it could have on businesses at a local level, including here in the Valley, stating that within five years jobs that rely on generating ideas may be replaced or supplemented by ChatGPT.
But he doesn’t believe a six-month moratorium is the best way to address these concerns. He believes the best approach is to put it out in the open while it’s still new and the stakes are low because it has not touched every part of society. He likens the pause to rewinding the internet — something that is not plausible.
“What we are looking at here is not a linear evolution, we’re looking at a geometric revolution, “ Serpico stated. “I don’t know if we are ready for it as a society. I’m excited and terrified at the same time. This is literally going to change everything.”